We received a lot of great feedback from our last round of playtesting. Thank you again to everyone that participated. Here are some of the gameplay changes we have in response to the new insights.
One thing we consistently heard is mining often feels underpowered and players want to engage with the mining mechanic more. However often it was expensive in terms of the number of minions required to mine out a large section of dungeon. In the latest build, rocks can spawn in a variety of tetris-like shapes include 1x2, 1x3, and L-shaped blocks. This randomization allows for the creation of larger spaces to build traps or death corridors requiring fewer mining minions, as well as provide interesting geometric decisions about how to carve out the shape of the dungeon.
A feature that was heavily requested was some form of meta-progression. While we were initially hesitant on add meta-progression, in the end, it seemed beneficial for rewarding repeated plays and allowing players to self-select the desired difficulty. Now, each run earns players experience which is converted into souls. Souls can be allocated in the upgrades tab of the start menu which allows the player to start the run with some Ancient Tomes already in play. Souls can be freely reallocated if players decided they want to explore different strategies.
Another change we made was to make progress towards dungeon tasks (eg. constructing a building, mining ore) reset at the start of each night phase. This change rewards players for careful planning of how they assign their minions as all tasks will need to be attempted and completed in a single night phase. We felt that this made the gameplay snappier and more engaging. However, with this change there are some nights when players may draw minion combinations that are very difficult to utilize. To combat this, players can now "hold" up to 2 minions in their hand at the end of each night that does not count towards their hand size for the next draw.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out the new playtest build! That's it for now!